


Interlude

by fuckener



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 17:12:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18921460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckener/pseuds/fuckener
Summary: “I try,” Bucky says, his voice low. “I try to stay away. I just never last long.”





	Interlude

Sam almost dies in the hideout in Sibiu, strangled by a two hundred and fifty pound Hydra lapdog after thinking he’d successfully cleared the whole goddamn floor.

It’s a close thing. He knows because he’s died before, remembers feeling himself fade out like this, remembers the terror of not knowing how to stop it from happening. 

He writhes against it, tries thrashing his arms. They don’t move from the floor. The knee in his windpipe digs in further, and all he sees is the man’s face above him, red and straining, the feral look in his eyes - and then there’s a blur of motion, and he gasps around the ability to breath again.

He sits up and hacks up blood coughing. There’s a sound coming from his left, this horrible sound he can’t figure out, and when he turns it takes a second for him to understand what he’s seeing.

It’s a crunching noise. Bones breaking. Bucky - it’s Bucky. He doesn’t stop. The look on his face is - he won’t fucking stop.

“Buck,” Sam calls out, voice ragged. It doesn’t carry over the sound of Bucky’s vibranium fist. “Bucky. _Bucky!_ ”

Bucky’s good hand stops in mid-air, the knuckles jutting out. He stares down at the man underneath him, his hair wild across his face, mouth twisted, his eyes wide and pale. Looks like someone Sam hasn’t seen in ten years.

Bucky swallows. He wipes his hands on his legs, leaving dark streaks up his thighs. When he looks up at Sam his eyes catch on his throat and he breathes out, “ _Jesus_ ,” and stumbles over the Hydra agent's body trying to get to him.

-

Bucky says he knows where Sam’s been staying and drives them both there after doing clean-up on the job. Sam sits in the passenger seat of the beat up secondhand car Bucky’s got and says nothing, because his throat feels ripped up inside and he doesn’t know what there is to say. 

There’s no point asking what the hell Bucky is doing all the way out here. The mess he left that guard in is enough of an answer.

It’s silent the whole drive apart from the sound of the car struggling over dirt roads and his own rasping breath. Halfway through the journey Bucky reaches up between them and puts his good hand flat on Sam’s chest without taking his eyes off the road.

Sam tips his head back and feels tired, impossibly tired. He curls a hand over Bucky’s and looks at him in the rear view mirror, the hard set of his mouth, until he can’t anymore.

-

Bucky pulls up by the side of an abandoned country road and helps him out of the suit. He gives Sam civilian clothes to wear that hang off him a bit too much and then he changes into clothes that don’t have blood all over them. Sam helps him wash his hands and his busted up knuckles by dousing them with a warm bottle of Sprite they find in the dash. After they pull into the motel parking lot they leave all the proof of a Hydra resurgence from the hideout, all the shit that Sam’s spent three months tracking down, leave it all in the trunk of the car that doesn’t lock properly and hide the shield under one of the front seats. It’s not the way Captain America should do things.

“You need to disguise yourself better when you’re out on jobs like this,” Bucky tells him when they’re inside and he’s locked the room door.

“I’m not Steve,” Sam croaks, sitting on the thin mattress. He touches his throat gingerly and winces. “It’s different, man.”

Bucky looks at him and Sam thinks he might say something, but instead he turns sharply and walks away. Sam shuts his eyes and sighs. He can hear Bucky rummaging around in the kitchenette.

“Here.”

He opens his eyes. Bucky has two bottles of water from the fridge and holds one out towards him. 

Sam takes it, unscrews the cap and drinks about half of it in ten seconds flat. It hurts on the way down, hurts when he swallows. He doesn’t feel concussed and Bucky checked him in the car to confirm it, but he feels bone-tired and heavy and like he needs to lie down for a day. 

Bucky sits down next to him and doesn’t quite meet his eyes when he says, by way of explanation, “You don’t have any ice.”

Carefully, he presses the other bottle against Sam’s windpipe. It’s just cold enough to feel numbing.

“Bucky,” Sam says, because he knows it has to be him who starts this conversation, but Bucky tells him, “You really shouldn’t be talking right now.”

Sam thinks about this. Bucky’s thumb skims a fresh cut on the side of his chin and then he thinks, no, fuck it.

“I asked you to come,” he says. He looks sidelong at Bucky and Bucky looks resolutely at where he’s holding the bottle to Sam’s skin. “I told you I wanted you here with me and you turned me down again. Then you follow me anyway and fucking, I don’t know, watch me through windows so that -” He turns, frowning. “Have you done this before?”

Bucky finally meets his eyes. His jaw tenses. After a moment, he shrugs.

Sam stares at him. “How many missions?” 

Bucky presses his lips together, says, “I don’t know,” and Sam scoffs and pushes his hand away. 

“I don’t get it. You act like you’re pushing me away but you don’t actually do it, so what the hell is the point?”

“I try,” Bucky says, his voice low. “I try to stay away. I just never last long.”

Sam doesn’t know what to do with that. 

He turns away again. Drinks the rest of his water.

“You still have blood on your face,” he says, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. He looks forward, out the window, where it’s turning dark over the mountains in the distance. “Go shower.”

He can feel Bucky’s eyes on him. The bed springs creak when he gets up and other bottle rolls across the bedspread into Sam’s leg.

Bucky goes over to the bathroom and flicks the toilet light on and stands in the doorway for a moment.

“You don’t know what this is like,” he says.

The door scuffs closed behind him. Sam drops back on the bed and puts the bottle against his bruised neck and can’t get the sound of Bucky breaking that Hydra’s guard’s face out of his head.

-

Bucky comes back out in the same clothes smelling like Sam’s body wash and deodorant, hair damp around his temples. Sam watches him from the same spot he’s been lying in the past twenty minutes and waits for him to break the silence.

Bucky puts a hand in his pocket, rattling the car keys.

“I should.” He glances sideways at the door, then the bed. “I don’t think you’re concussed, so I don’t need to.” The keys rattle again.

“Bucky, I want you to sleep here,” Sam says, and it’s hard to be patient after having this conversation so many times, after this long weird fucking day, but he tries. He sits up straight. “Do you?”

Bucky mumbles, shakes his head. “Of course I do. You know I do.”

“So why the fuck are you trying to sleep in that little car?”

Bucky pushes a hand through his hair and says, “We can’t keep - I can’t -”

“I want you here with me,” Sam says. 

He doesn’t feel like Captain America when they’re alone together like this, doesn’t feel like he can be trusted to always do the right thing when it comes to he and Bucky. He always ends up feeling too desperate. 

He can’t keep it down any longer, says, “You can’t save me and then just leave.”

Bucky stands there, says nothing. He looks so unintimidating, as small as any other person. 

He sits back down beside Sam. He touches Sam’s cheek with the back of his fingers, sighing, and in the dim light from the windows Sam can see how tired he is. He thinks about Bucky following him around the world with a rifle and a first aid kit in hand and reaches up to grip him by the back of the neck. 

They should talk more, there are things they need to talk about. Sam has played out the conversations he wants them to have in his head over and over, has forgotten all of the important things he wanted to say right now. Bucky leans forward and Sam meets him halfway. 

-

Bucky is painstakingly careful not to hurt him. Sam forgets that sex with him is like this, that it scares him in a way nothing else does. It’s too much responsibility to be the only person left in the world that Bucky Barnes loves.

“Is this okay?” he asks with his face pressed into Sam’s cheek, the weight of his body on Sam’s light enough to keep from pressing on any bruised ribs. 

It hurts because Sam hurts all over anyway, but it’s been long enough since they’ve done this that he doesn’t care. It’s Bucky. Sam digs his heels into the small of his back, pulls him closer, huffs for breath through his torn up throat.

“It’s good,” Sam says. He shuts his eyes, blindly kisses the stubble on Bucky’s jaw. “It’s perfect. Keep going.”

The motel bed struggles under the two of them. Bucky pulls back and presses his forehead against Sam’s and looks at him, straight at him. He shakes his head and just says, “Sam.”

-

The column of Sam’s throat is black and purple the next morning with bruises, going all the way down to his chest. Light has seeped in through the thin curtains and he can see it when he looks down at himself, the mess he’s in. 

He turns to the side and Bucky is looking at the same trail of discoloured skin. 

“You could give it up,” Bucky says quietly. 

“No,” Sam rasps. “I couldn’t.”

They look at each other for a while. Bucky’s metal arm is off, propped up against the side of the bed. There are deep shadows under his eyes. He needs a haircut, Sam thinks. 

He reaches up and cards his fingers through the hair behind Bucky’s ear, back and forth, his nails scratching over scalp. Bucky closes his eyes, breathes in. 

Sam lies there looking at him and cards his fingers back and forth, back and forth. Doesn’t want to get off of this bed. The light from the window moves across them and passes.


End file.
